Friday Random Music

It's an exciting weekend of course, a day or two away from the happiest day of the year, that sign that all is well with the world. Before that fateful moment, only 2 days away! I shall try to put up some kind of preview, prediction or the like - which, after last year's playoff predictions (a perfect 0-8!) ought to be greeted with, um - something... I must also admit that I am working up to a pile of list posts: I don't obsess over ranking movies like I have in the past, but I sort of want to put something up, go on record, as it were. Kind of a reference thing... In honor of the end of the first quarter of 2007, I suppose you'd day.... But tonight - you'll have to settle for music. The usual - iTunes up, random, 10 songs, stars, comments, whatever comes to mind...

1. Yo La Tengo - Blue Line Swinger *** - I do like Yo La Tengo....
2. Beck - Nicotine and Gravy **** - she looks so Israeli...
3. Gomez - How We Operate *** - nice song, but I didn't like this record as much as the previous one, Split the Difference I guess that one was - that was a great record... this one is just okay...
4. Sunny Day Real Estate - Song About an Angel - I suspect I should feel guilty about liking them, and other Jeremy Enegk records - and when they get mewling away, well - it's easy to wonder what the appeal is.... this one is a bit more mewl than not.
5. Jay Farrar - Cahokian (live) - I've hinted at this before, but I really do like Jay Farrar - he slides around, just under my attention a lot of the time, but every time I hear him, I remember how good he is, how consistent, how enjoyable. I sometimes need to be reminded, which is one of the reasons I like the iPod so much - most of the acts I have on there come up sooner or later - every time I hear one of his, I push a couple songs onto the narrower playlists. This one is likely to get a few stars before I'm done listening to it today.
6. Flipper - Sex Bomb - another great record, though this is a very silly song....
7. Pere Ubu - My Boyfriend's Back - an odd little number from that newest record.
8. Gomez - Nothing is Wrong (live) **** - hey! ask and you shall receive! The studio version, actually, gets 5 stars - but this is very nice. One of a bunch of songs on that record I really like.
9. Replacements - Dose of Thunder - at their crappiest sub-Kiss scroungy worst; which is to say, hell of a song. In it's shitty (shitfaced) way.
10. DNA - Blonde Red Head **** - probably the best of the Pere Ubu offshoots. What you say? yeah - Tim Wright - yeah... anyway, very cool...

As for video - YouTube has been acting up, in Camino at least - I don't know if it's just me, or YouTube or Camino... anyway, hope this works: who or what shall we post? Gomez makes sense - there are a dozen versions of this song on YouTube, but this one stands out - neat arrangement, noice sound, even if it does eliminate their most interesting aspect, the percussion...

Every Blogathon I Know Of

Have other people done this? Probably. I myself have started this from reading Edward Copeland's post on upcoming blogathons, and indeed stealing his links. (And Andy Horbal's as well.) (Plus any other blogathon indexers I can find: FilmSquish offers a particularly complete compilation - going back to the beginning, getting a few I missed; Piper at Lazy Eye Theater keeps a calendar in his sidebar as well.) But I am going back and putting in as many as I can find. I need a way to keep track of these things a bit better. (This is obviously a work in progress: one for the sidebar. Also, to be updated with new blogathons as I discover them, and fleshed out with any comments or additional links I decide to add over time. For example, adding the actual blogathon pages to the announcements, as they come in. And, I think, adding links to my contributions: not because they're anything special, but as a way for me to find them in a hurry.)

January 14, 2008: Val Lewton blogathon, hosted by Michael Guillen.

January 1-5, 2008: And start the new year with an Opening Credits Blogathon, at continuity.

December 27-30: End the year with an Endings Blogathon, at Joe's Movie Corner. Here it is.

December 16: in honor of its 24-7 presence on the airwaves, a day for It's A Wonderful Life, at Cinemathetics. The day has arrived - here it is.

December 2-8: Short Film Day at Ed Howard's blog. Make that week, in conjunction with Culture Snob.

November 19: Here's one I almost missed: A Queer Film Blogathon, at Queering the Apparatus.

November 15-22: work up a Thanksgiving appetite with a week of Kurosawa movies at Film Squish! Main page here.

November 10: A Bob Fosse fest at Forward to Yesterday. Showtime.

November 7-9, 2007: Film and Faith blogathon at Strange Culture. Posts here.

November 6-11: Comedy blogathon at New Critics - for any format: films, TV, books, stand up, you name it...

October 22-26: The Broken Projector's Double Bill-a-thon - write about 2 films for the price of one! Twice the fun!

October 17: Honor Montgomery Clift, at Film Experience. Happy Birthday, Monty.

October 12-21: Close-Up Blogathon, at The House Next Door. Going strong.

September 24-30, 2007: A whole week of Bunuel at Flickhead. And here it is.

September 21-23: William Wyler honored at GoatDog. Articles here.

September 7-10, 2007: Slapstick Blogathon at Film of the Year. Read it Here.

August 29: Lee Marvin blogathon, picked up in progress.

August 27-29: Bizarro Blogathon, hosted by Piper at Lazy Eye Theater. Which sucked royally. I am far too serious for this sort of thing, though careless readers may think this WC Fields post is a joke.

August 5: John Huston blogathon, from Sophomore Critic. Announcement here. I have a post about Beat the Devil (and Huston's adventure films generally) up.

August: In a twist on the format, but worth mentioning - Damien at Windmills of My Mind promises 31 days of Spielberg: "I will view each and every available Spielberg film, write a corresponding piece about it and then post them here on my blog, one a day throughout the entire month of August (31 days, 31 posts)" sez he.

July 24, 2007: Monster Squad-a-Thon, at DVD Panache. Contents of said blogathon, here.

July 13, 2007: Not sure how this happened (vacation! yeah, that's it!), but I somehow missed the Friday 13th Blogathon at Final Girl.

7 July, 2007: The Performance that Changed Your Life - at All About My Movies. Read it here.

June 29-July 9: John Ford - in French, but c'est la vie. And here is the link.

June 21-25, 2007: Film Music - at Windmills of my Mind. Beginning a day early!

June 20-24: Ambitious Failure blogathon, at Savage Art - already underway.

June 12: Action Heroines at Film Experience. (I'm stealing most of these new links from Edward Copeland - that's where I stole most of the old ones, too.) Here it is. And as promised, my Brigitte Lin appreciation.

June 11: Sneaking in late - it's a Grease 2 Blogathon Chezzzz Moviezzzz. Underway.

June 8-10: Ghiblog-a-thon hosted by Joe's Movie Corner, dedicated to all things from Studio Ghibli. (Expanding on Quiet Bubble's Miyazaki blogathon from last year.) Opportunities here for synergy - repurpose those Princess Mononoke posts for the Action heroines blogathon a couple days later! Here's the Ghibili-a-thon HQ.

June 4-8, 2007: Simpsons - at Esoteric Rabbit - and here it is.

May 25, 2007: Star Wars - celebrating the 30th anniversary, at Edward Copeland's place. The host of contributions are indexed here.

May 16-20: Misunderstood Blogathon, at Culture Snob.com. Underway. I contributed another essay on Inland Empire. (Probably not the last thing I'll write about Mr. Lynch.)

April 23, 2007: Shakespeare on Film with Peter Nellhaus - underway here.

April 9-11, 2007: John Carpenter blogathon at Lazy Eye Theater (in honor of the release of Grindhouse). Up and running!

April 8, 2007: Mobathon announcement at the Boob Tubers. And the Mobathon itself.

April 5, 2007 (and forward): Trashy Movies - at Bleeding Tree. Underway, here.

April 1, 2007: White Elephant Blogathon at Lucid Screening - Home Page here

March 30-April 2, 2007: Favorite Screenplays at Mystery Man on Film - Table of Contents

March 23-25, 2007: 1927 Blogathon at Goatdog

March 21, 2007: Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors at Hell on Frisco Bay - the blogathon itself is here.

March 5, 2007: Kieslowski blogathon at Quiet Bubble

March 1-4, 2007: Billy Wilder at Filmscreed. My link to it has some discussion of The Apartment.

February 16-19, 2007: Jim Emerson's Contrarian blogathon, which I contrarily left out when I first posted this.

Feb 14: Lovesick Blogathon at Lucas McNelly's site - and, the thing itself.

January, 2007: Unspoken Cinema - contemplative cinema: still active! (Also - as Andy Horbal mentions in the comments - the sidebar at this site contains links to a great many previous blogathons - up to Andy's criticism blogathon, conveniently enough.) I contributed a couple posts - here's the tag.

December 3, 2006: Film Criticism at Andy Horbal's No More Marriages. I have two related posts: favorite critics, and five more.

April 5, 2006: Roger Corman.

March 3, 2006: Robert Altman, at the House Next Door. I wrote two posts for this - one about Altman's influence on me as a movie fan; the other a long geeky thing about McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Temper Temper!

I don't know why I've been so lazy about posting lately, but there's nothing like a blogosphere pissing contest to churn up some easy content.... Pissing contest isn't quite the term - inexplicable meltdown is more like it. I refer, of course (well, of course if you read the kind of political blogs who care about this sort of thing), to Ann Althouse going all Klaus Kinski on an episode of bloggingheads with Garance Franke-Ruta. It's pretty ridiculous, but fortunately, I can relate it to movies, my preferred blogging topic - I can compare it to David O. Russell and Lily Tomlin, having it out on the set of I Heart Huckabees!

I didn't have a lot to say about those clips when they came out - it's a fascinating train wreck, but I couldn't come up with a coherent opinion about it all. But reading Tomlin's comments on the clips, and watching Althouse's performance, brings it into a bit more clarity. A lot of the commentary seemed to center on the idea that Russell is an asshole - but I think that's a bit simplistic. Tomlin basically says, yeah, it's over the top, buit it was a tense shoot, and it cleared the air - shit happens. And that Althouse rant - I noticed a couple things.

1) The Huckabees fights are, indeed, fights - the bad behavior is reciprocal. It's interesting that two clips were making the rounds - the one of Tomlin raving in a car, the one of Russell trashing a set. Even in that clip, Tomlin needles him before it goes off - and keeps giving it back all through the tirade. But Althouse vs. Franke-Ruta is nothing like that: Franke-Ruta's remarks that set Althouse off are completely innocuous, a neutral reference to an old controversy. (And probably the simple truth - as Ezra Klein says, Althouse's comments about Jessica Valenti were the root of his disdain for her. He's probably not alone.) Althouse starts raving, and Franke-Ruta is completely taken aback, tries to talk her down, and when that doesn't work, sits and waits for it to end. (You can almost read her mind, though - she had to be thinking something like, "my god, she's an idiot; will she ever shut her yap?") It's all Althouse, the raving, and completely unprovoked.

2) Maybe it's because I've been watching a lot of Columbo lately, but there are a couple little moments in these clips that set off alarms. You know how in every episode, there's something, some little detail - where Columbo notices the killer? May not have anything to do with the crime itself - but there's something, a tell.... There's something of that in these clips. In the Huckabees clip, it's when Russell comes back into the room after trashing the set, and almost doubles over, screaming at Tomlin to act like an adult. It's a brilliant moment - the unintended comedy is beautiful - a grown man, screaming like a 3 year old at a grown woman to act like an adult... it's so brilliant, and so funny, it undermined the "un" in unintentional. That's the place where, in the backstage movie, someone tells him to stop acting - or makes a crack about being sure the camera is still running. You expect someone to yell "cut" at the end. It's worth noting - Huckabees feels like that little scene - it's full of blow ups and tantrums and confrontations, with that same tone - tense and jittery, full of fast mood shifts, and contrasting reactions - one person raving, someone else sitting with their feet up waiting for the nonsense to end. So really - how much of the backstage shenanigans are intended almost as rehearsals for the shooting itself? Maybe not consciously, but at some level - it's certainly notable that Russell really never breaks character as a filmmaker - that's a very cinematic fit he throws - his entrances and exits work. And Tomlin, sitting or standing there, sarcastic and defiant through the lot of it, balances him. The clip works as a scene.

Ditto Ann Althouse. What struck me there probably wasn't relevant - the fact that she lost her temper, throwing a fit, and (unlike those Hollywood types) never slipped and used any bad words. I don't know if she is in the habit of using bad words - maybe not; maybe there's a perfectly good explanation for it. But it occurred to me - she is a professional talker (like Russell and Tomlin), a lawyer and professor - and she never breaks character. The second time I looked at it, it occurred to me - she does a lot of whining about the "progressive blogosphere" but she doesn't name any names. Some allusions to Tapped - no details. The rant, then, is strange and unprovoked and extreme - but almost completely contentless - and mostly clean, both in the language and in her general ability to keep to the topic (or away from any real topic.) It is, I mean, a performance - quite deliberate, and probably planned ahead of time. Now in her case - there's more evidence. Take this post on her blog - bragging about her previous pissing contests; saying she like the theater of it. (She doesn't use words like theater, but hey...) Which all brings the episode into some focus - the reason she jumps on Franke-Ruta's tame comments, the reason, once she does get going, that she doesn't mention any of her distracters by name - is that it's all about her. The word "narcissistic" has been thrown around a lot here - but it's about right. That's one of the most narcissistic things I've seen - and her reactions on her blog, all proud and preening and trivial, just confirms it.

So - this brings us back to Russell and Tomlin - because by god it makes them look a hell of a lot better. They act like idiots - but they both act like idiots. They are very probably egging each other on. They are making a film that is trying to achieve something like the tone those fights have. And when you get down to it - they are a whole lot better at it than Althouse is. They are funnier, especially Tomlin, they have a far better sense of stagecraft, those entrances and exits, the timing of their rants. And they have none of the sense of preening self-regard Althouse has - they commit to their raving.... I was unfair up at the top, comparing Althouse to Klaus Kinski - Kinski - there was a man who knew how to throw a temper tantrum!

Musical Lotteryish Post

I have to do some writing - I have been in a funk since the end of that Rivette series... oh well. For now, we'll have to make do with another music post... randomness! ratings when I've entered them! comments if I think of any! etc.! Huzzah!

1. Bad Brains - Sailin' On [not particularly sure why this isn't rated]
2. Of Montreal - The Party's Crashing Us
3. Prince - Uptown or this]
4. The Byrds - CTA-102
5. REM - Everybody Hurts **** - the last REM record I cared about; the first one I'd cared about in a couple when it came out. Then for a long while, I've sort of ignored it - though the songs are quite good, when you hear them after a gap, like this
6. John Cale - Bamboo Floor
7. Mercury Rev - Hudson Lines ***
8. Monk - Nice work if you can get it (trio version) - **** - a somewhat arbitrary rating. Everything on that Genius of Modern Music compilation is basically something I would want to hear any time it came on - which is sort of my definition of 4-5 stars. And this is one of my favorite cuts...
9. Big Country - Look Away - they seem to turn up on random a lot. I onl;y have one record, a greatest hits... I'm not complaining - they were a very nice, rather underrated band.
10. Journey - Wheel in the Sky (live) - sweet Jesus. How did this get on here? actually, it's not half bad - this song at least they play live like they mean it - by this stage in their career, their records were getting squishy - but this version has some kick. I don't know why they can't always sound like this - this is what power pop should sound like. The records - are slop.

Video: let's see - maybe something that came up after the random 10 ended? In fact, yeah - this came up a bit later: so let's put it up: Massive Attack, Karmacoma - a cool video, but not quite up to Wong Kar-wei and Leon Lai...

Where to Browse

..or, where I've been browsing...

Girish, as always - this week, a post on early Kiarostami. With video!

David Bordwell, meanwhile, is blogging from Hong Kong - daily reports. There are times I don't know how we lived without the internet.

Dennis Cozzalio, meanwhile, has posted the footage of David O. Russell and Lily Tomlin going at it while shooting I Heart Huckabees - actually, next to everybody has posted it, but he's got the best discussion of it going on there...

Calvert DeForest is dead - Larry "Bud" Melman, Letterman sidekick. The House Next Door has a nice tribute, and some great clips of Larry Bud in action...

Lance Mannion, meanwhile, takes a look at films in classrooms - interesting conversation follows.

And, finally - peril on the internets! America's most Dangerous Professor (one of them anyway) has returned - Michael Berube joins Crooked Timber. Lock up your sons and daughters, or at least, any crazy ex-Stalinist uncles turned, um, right wing neo-Stalinist D-Hos!

Finally, looking at Crooked Timber reminds me that John Inman has also died. Mr. Humphreys from Are You Being Served? A show I confess to almost loathing - though somehow it's complete shamelessness saves it. Names like Slocumb and Peacock and Humphreys certainly help - if you're going to go for cheap puns, no point in going halfway: and frankly, the unabashed, over the top campiness of the acting, with Inman leading the way, is the main thing that kept it watchable. So - he's worth saluting.

Music on Friday Even

Oh the weather outside if frightful, but iTunes is so delightful; no particular place to go - let it snow let it snow let it snow. Of course the biggest snowstorm of the year comes in March, what do you expect when it's 70 degrees and sunny in January?

Onwards then, with comments and whatever I can think of to turn this post into something more than a dry recitation of 10 song titles and a pirated tv clip....

1. Allman Brothers - Stand Back - this is, I'm afraid, almost complete wallpaper music...
2. Jay Farrar - Feel Free (live version) - I like Jay Farrar. I may have noted this on this blog before, though I'm not sure - but I've always liked Son Volt/Farrar more than Wilco - I like Wilco, but... that's actually a little less true these days - Nils Cline gives them a definite leg up... either way, Uncle Tupelo was a hell of a band, yes they were, and both alumni have put out some very fine music...
3. George Harrison - Hear Me Lord - uncle tupelo is not the first band to spawn a variety of fine acts of course....
4. Tommy Keene - Tattoo - from a Mojo collection, this one "Who Covered"
5. Richard Thompson - Night Comes in - ***** - the live version from Guitar, Vocal. As they say in those blindfold tests in Downbeat - a million stars. Or Carl Saganishly: billions and billions of stars... I spent about a year listening to this song every night before I went to bed back in the 90s.... it's not, by the way, my favorite Thompson performance, either....
6. Nine Inch Nails - Heresy - more wallpaper.
7. New Order - Temptation - **** - let the rating speak for itself...
8. Captain Beefheart - Nowadays a Woman's Got to Hit a Man - "dawned on me man, than a man been doing a woman unfair"
9. Kinks - Supersonic Rocket Ship
10. Bob Dylan - Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts - no rating? well - see, ratings are there to pull songs out on playlists. 5 stars means, really - I will listen to this song to the end every time it comes on. 4 means it is a song I want to hear a lot, and love, though perhaps not in every temper. 3? means I want to hear it more often than purely random. Leaving whole swarms of stuff - especially by the old standbys (Dylan and the Kinks definitely falling into the category) - unrated, just because I have so much of it, or have heard it so much. Anyyay - all of Blood on the Tracks should be 3 stars at least, but, you know...

Video! Searching for Richard Thompson is a good way to sink a couple hours in a hurry... there's much to choose from (though mpost of it later than the song above), but this - an 80s performance of Fairport Convention with Thompson - has to settle the issue:

Links and Habits

All right: here is a new scheme, unlikely to get very far, but worth trying - tossing up posts of links every day or so. Another attempt to trick myself into posting more often, and more interactively.

Here's one - Edward Copeland on "nails on chalkboard" actors and actresses. I name Renee Zellweger. (The post linked from The House Next Door's invaluable links for the day, which this post is in no way* imitating.)

From a couple days ago, The Little Round-headed Boy offers up a list of choices for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That's always a fun topic, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - trying to figure out what criteria they have for admission, and why anyone, including me, should pretend to care. I may have to come back to this. My short answer - that unless they put Kiss and Pere Ubu in, it is worthless, or at best completely arbitrary - may or may not suffice.

Dennis Cozzalio, meanwhile, runs through the responses to his last mid-term film quiz, in anticipation of a new one. And adds a word or two to the latest round of Death of Film hand-wringing - and links to Kristin Thompson's rather exhaustive debunking.

And the Bordwell blog, as usual, is full of stuff: Bordwell's post (from almost a week ago now) on the working of suspense and why spoilers don't spoil anything is particularly fascinating. Another subject I hope to come back to....

Finally - there are five million posts about politics I could link too: most related to the US Attorney Purge and the adventures of Alberto Gonzalez. Talking Points Memo has been on this the most, so I'll point there. And maybe to this comment by Ezra Klein about "Bush's Razor" - "Given a possible universe of explanations for a particular administration action, the most morally pessimistic and politically cynical will inevitably be proven correct." The happy days of Reagan's dilemma (is he an idiot or a villain?) seem to be gone: Bush's administration, consistently, manages to be both - hatching nefarious schemes that they botch....

* This sentence will make more sense if you replace the words "in no way" with the word "shamelessly".

The Music Post

Maybe I should stop pretending this is a "Friday Random Ten" post and admit, it's a Weekend Music Post." Anyway - today's entertainment comes by way of Salon's Audiofile pointer to The Definitive 200 Albums of all time. As chosen by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Association of Recording Merchandisers. "Complete your collection!" Well, at least they're honest about it. If it's not literally the 200 best selling albums since 1955, it's damned close. Arranged in what appears to be a random order, after the top 10 - which consists of: Sgt Pepper; Dark Side of the Moon; Thriller; Led Zeppelin IV; The Joshua Tree; Exile on Main Street; Tapestry; Highway 61 Revisited; Pet Sounds and Nevermind - a completely inoffensive, uncontroversial and useless sort of list.... the comedy comes later, when Kenny G records clock in ahead of Beggar's Banquet and Creed and Linkin Park beat out London Calling. I may be obliged to offer a follow up on Andy Horbal's recent canon post....

Anyway, let's get on with the business of the day:

1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - From Her to Eternity [***] - what! no Nick Cave on the definitive 200 list!? What?
2. The Ramones - Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World [***] - what? No Ramones on the definitive 200 list?! This, of course, renders the exercise meaningless.
3. Cheap Trick - Clock Strikes Ten (live at Budokon) - wait a second - no Live at Budokon on the definitive 200?
4. George Harrison - Ballap of Sir Francis Crisp - this made it, I have to admit. #69, right behind Kid Rock's Devil without a Cause. I can see this is going to be a superb source of comedy...
5. Fleetwood Mac - I Don't Wanna Know - shoot, two in a row. #24, which, given a mainstream and commercial point of view, is quite justifiable.
6. Lou Reed/John Cale/Nico - Waiting for the Man (from Le Bataclan 72) - What? No Velvets? You know, by now, most lists like this, however dimwitted they may be, manage to work in something a little left-field - Velvets, Ramones, Stooges - you know... oh well...
7. Black Flag - Rise Above [****] - what!? etc.... But if you're oging to use a word like "definitive" - you are, in cold fact, claiming to be canon-making: and if you are going to make canons, you have to account for something, well - definitive: you have to try to map the terrain, as it were. That's what canons ought to be about - showing what has been done, and how. Leaving out records like this might as well leave out half the history of rock music, if nothing else. Oh well.
8. Dinosaur Jr. - Green Mind
9. The Warlocks - Baby Blue - from the phoenix Album - which is why it's not rated, by the way - the live version they released gets 4 stars: Warlocks sound a bit better live, where things get stretched and flogged a bit.
10. Tom Waits - Black Box Theme - What?! - you know where this is going?

Where else could it go? Here is a suggestion of what to do about this particular list....



Twice! a great live version - shot off someone's TV set, so kind of crappy looking - but a first rate performance....

Midweek Links Post

I have fallen back into my bad habits, a post a week, plus the odd ritual. We must do better! But as I have nothing original to contribute - I shall run through some links....

First - Lucas McNelly at 100 Films has come up with a great idea - to review "uber-indie" films - films sliding under the regular channels of distribution. (Though part of the point might be that the regular channels of distribution are changing: web sales, YouTube/Google Video, iPod downloads are all changing how you can get films - it's interesting... There's a nice post on 100 Films discussing these new channels of distribution, criticism and so on - worth looking at.) So far he's done Matt Zoller Seitz' Home, and Crooked Features - reviews are posted both at his site and at Talkingmoviezzz. (You can also check out Lucas' own films at d press Productions.)

Second: where did I find this? (Not surprisingly, Making Light.) But god damn this is sweet - Strange Maps: a blog dedicated to - wait for it... strange maps! A beautiful thing...

And so - tomorrow, we may get some music... and then? A weekend bringing The Host and a Brothers Quay film series... (Next weekend, Two or Three Things I Know About Her gets a revival - with more to follow.... oh boy.) With luck, I will manage to write something. Until then....

Two Blogathons of Note

As it happens, this weekend there are two blogathons going on, honoring two very outstanding filmmakers - Billy Wilder, hosted by Filmscreed, and Krystof Kieslowski, hosted at the Quiet Bubble. Both are sure to be must reads. I don't know how much I can offer - not that they aren't both great directors, not that I haven't been inspired by their films - just - well - I can't say I have a lot to say, right now. So I will leave most of it to the rest...

One thing I do want to note, though: like a lot of people, I have tended to think of Wilder primarily as a writer. But he could make pictures, too. This is not an argument, this post - just some screen grabs - but I think they show what he could do.

This started a year or so ago - I was writing a paper about Cindy Sherman's film still series. And went through some of my DVDs, looking for analogous shots. I figured The Apartment would be a good place to look - it was.



That was what I hoped I'd find - that's a shot that, other than the cinemascope framing, could have come from Sherman as easily as an actual film. A woman, alone, in some kind of angst - though also located in the middle of a scene. That was what I was interested in in Sherman's work - the ways she created narratives out of still images, the ways she places the women in her photos. Like this one:



...the rather intricate way Sherman creates a scene from this picture - the woman's eyeline, the way she holds whatever she has in her hand, the table, candles and all, her clothes, all suggesting there has been a private supper here... Combined with the way she excludes the other person - not just that there is no second person in the shot - but there are no signs of the other person. Even in the mirror - there's only one wine glass, one chair, one coat, and it belongs to the woman.... That shot of Shirley MacLaine follows almost all those rules: she's alone, though clearly reacting to someone else - but there's no sign of him. The closest you come is that doll in the background... And all the rest - the decor, her makeup, her gloves, the way she is sitting - is as posed as those Sherman photos. It's certainly the kind of shot Sherman was imitating....

But looking at the film that way (going through it looking for clips), I noticed other things - like these shots:

Now this is, actually, analogous to some of Sherman's photos - she sometimes uses this kind of deeper field, always to isolate a single person in a space. Wilder creates this shot rather interestingly: Jack Lemmon starts the shot in a two-shot with the doctor (they've discovered MacLaine unconscious in his bed), but he moves, and the camera moves with him, to create this fantastic composition. Deep focus, deep staging, aperture framing (you can see MacLaine on the bed in the distance - though you'll have to blow the picture up to see her), and the foreground objects like that lamp... And this continues, to create, eventually, this shot:



An absolutely stunning use of widescreen, deep space, staging, cinematography - MacLaine stumbling out of the bedroom in the background while Lemmon talks on the phone.... the purely formal elements, the placement of objects, that record sleeve that balances MacLaine’s appearance, the curves and arches, open and closed doors. Outstanding.

I don't know if Wilder's films all look as good as this one - if he sustained this level of work as a director. The problem is, he was such an exciting writer, sometimes everything else got short shrift. So I don't know. I just know that parts of this film can stand with anything...

Friday Music Stuff

On Friday even! Random ten! the usual routine. Here goes:

1. Stereolab - Wow and Flutter
2. Sonic Youth - Rain on Tin - from Murray Street - a record I think I took for granted a bit when it came out - listening to it, but only quite registering "Empty Page"... oddly, pulling the individual songs out (as the iPod does) benefits them - they are all exciting and beautiful - at least, this is. A surprising result for Sonic Youth...
3. Don Byron - Dreidel Song
4. Bad Brains - Don't Bother me - they are all so good...
5. Neil Young - World on a String - from Unplugged...
6.X - Los Angeles - ****
7. Wilco - Hell is Chrome - live version; nice enough, I guess
8. Spiritualized - Come Together - another good one, though I've never gotten aroudn to rating most of my Spacemen Three/Spiritualized records...
9. Carter Family - Sunshine in the Mountain
10. Ian Dury and the Blockheads - Sweet Gene Vincent

Video? Let's try some Ian Dury....

Post Oscar Lists n Links

I don't have anything really special to offer, but I might as well poke in....

Oscars! I didn't watch the thing (I did last year for the first time in 20, 25 years; I will when they get aroudn to giving David Lynch a lifetime achievement award - meanwhile, I can find better things to do with a Sunday night.) Martin Scorsese wins the big ones, best picture and director - reasonable choices. Unlike a lot of bloggers, I had no problem with any of the nominees - nothing great, but nothing embarrassing, not even Babel or Little Miss Sunshine, which both took a lot of lumps. I don't know - Babel is a mess, but - the direction, and in a lot of ways, the individual stories, save it. And Little Miss Sunshine was funny, and fairly clever, with a great cast - it went in the tank down the stretch (after Arkin's departure), but was amusing getting there. The worst I can say about the nominees is that a lot of better films, that were as popular, mainstream, etc. as these, were available - United 93, Children of Men (I can't expect Inland Empire to get any notice, so I won't complain there) - but unnominated. (Oh - and the three best Foreign Language films I saw, Indigenes, Lives of Others and Pan's Labyrinth - were themselves probably all better than the best picture nominees. So was Volver - how did that get missed for either award?) But that aside - given the Acedemy's track record through the years - the crap that has been nominated and won - I have nothing to complain about this years' crop.

Anyway - with Scorsese's win, I expected an outporuing of "greatest American living director" posts - haven't seen so many... Maybe a decade of complete mediocrity has taken the edge off the Scorsese fans. Still - I must say, the Lawyers, Guns and Money post raises a couple questions I'm interested enough in to answer: who are America's greatest living directers? and, what was the last time the best American (fiction) film won the Oscar?

Director? That's easy, friends. Consider this: I made me a list, the best American film of the year, from 1970 or so on: what do 1977, 1980, 1986, 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2006 have in common? You guessed it - David Lynch films, best of the year, as far as I'm concerned. He has lost nothing - he is still experimenting, exploring - he's as vital as he ever was. So - easily.

2) Scorsese, yes: he has a powerful body of work, and though he is not the director he was in the 70s, he still works, still does good work....
3) This is where things get difficult - actually it's kind of a straight up choice, I think: between Clint Eastwood and the Coen Brothers. The latter get the edge, because, I think, they have simply made the better films. Fargo, Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Big Lebowski are first rate - they have no bad films on the resume (even the Ladykillers is amusing). I tend to overlook them - loving their films - taking them for granted. Odd.
4) Eastwood, then - for the opposite virtue - for his classicism, his work ethic, his ability to make strong, well crafted films that explore big questions (and small) seriously and soberly. His empathy, his modesty - and a series of very good films. None of his films is quite a masterpiece - a couple though, creep into the back of the mind... Since seeing Letters From Iwo Jima, it has been growing in my mind - thinking about things like - the lack of conventional heroism in combat: I thought of that while watching Indigenes - how it builds to a fairly conventional heroic last stand, everything clear and straightforward - there's nothing like that in Letters, the fighting is all dark and confused and, most of the film, you don't see the enemy. It's an interesting choice - more interesting than I gave it credit for when I saw it.... I also want to note, with Forest Whitaker taking home an Oscar himself - that Bird is one of those films I love far more than I ever quite acknowledge....
5) Jim Jarmusch - sounds good - though like some of the others, he seems to have faded a bit. His 80s films are extraordinary - and Dead Man is one of the best films of the 90s - and he's never really made a bad film - but... Yet... I'll take him over the competition - Spielberg? Whose great films are scattered among plenty of mediocrity, and who often ruins his best work, not trusting the audience... Spike Lee? at his best? sure - but there's lots in between the peaks. Coppola? not since the 70s. Hartley? I'll listen to arguments. Anderson and Anderson? The best of the 90s and 00s - though PT has disappeared - and Wes sometimes seems in danger of spinning his wheels. Tarantino? as washed up as Scorsese and he's 20 odd years younger. Gus Van Sant? which Gus Van Sant? might get back into it, I guess. Todd Haynes? Charles Burnett? Noah Baumbach? Terry Gilliam? Lots of choices - it's a pack, behind the leaders....

So - there you have it. I don't think there are any old timers I have forgotten - a few years ago I made a list like this and was reminded, after I did it, that Billy Wilder was still alive - that sort of thing can put a damper on the fun. I don't know how hard I'd fight for this list - other than Lynch and probably Marty...

As for the other question - the last time the best (American) film of the year won the Best Picture Oscar? 1972? The Godfather? I think so.

Anyway - that's that. This is one of those posts that ends up going in a completely different direction than I originally thought. I actually started it looking for a way to post this - a link to a Google video of Todd Haynes' banned classic, Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story. (Via Tram at Talk to Me Harry Winston.)

What Day is It Again?

Friday random ten time! (You think I have problems with the day of the week - the other night I woke up, got out of bed, turned off the alarm, got dressed - all perfectly awake, I tell you!) - then looked around and said, damn it's dark: what's going on? then I looked at the clock and saw it was 2:11 am. That is a new phenomenon: it is one thing to turn off the snooze alarm while half awake - but to dream (apparently) that the alarm went off, and get up, get dressed and....) Onwards: music. (Ratings included when it's included in iTunes.)

1. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Sweet n Sour
2. Blind Faith - Well... All Right
3. Leonard Cohen - Sisters of Mercy ***
4. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone *** - that's a rather strange rating. Might be Dylan fatigue or something, rating the oens you hear on the radio All The Time lower than the ones, just as good, that don't get played so much. 5 star Dylan? It's All Right Ma... and Tangled Up in Blue - looks like overall Dylan fatigue...
5. Elvis Costello - Lipstick Vogue
6. Minutemen - Paranoid Chant *** - I've got a mile of numbers and a ton of stats...
7. Pixies - Monkey Goes to Heaven **** - haven't heard this is ages, I realize...
8. Camper Van Beethoven - Eye of Fatima (2) - the instrumental version...these two back to back take me back to my salad days
9. Slow Dazzle - The Prosecution Rests - I have no idea where this came from or why it's on my iPod. Not bad though
10. James Blood Ulmer - Nothing to Say - from Tales of Captain Black, a very great record

Thought I'd try some jazz - not a lot of Ulmer on YouTube, but there is this very cool clip of Ornette Coleman and quartet from Italian TV, with Ulmer:

Rivette Wrap up (2)

So, once more with the Rivette, and building on yesterday's post, I want to write a bit about duality and collaboration.

Out One: Spectre makes a particularly good starting place. Even more than usual for Rivette, it is built around matched pairs of things. The two investigators (Leaud and Berto); the two theater groups; the two plays; all the pairs within and between the groups: Thomas and Lilly (leaders of the two groups); the two outsiders, Sarah and Renaud, brought in to invigorate the two groups, who end up destroying them both by leaving. People with 2 names, like Pauline/Emily, and all the names Leaud goes by. Pauline/Emily's 2 kids. The two men who never turn up in the film, Pierre and Igor. The 2 "Thirteen" - Balzac's and the film's. The two sources of the secret messages, Lewis Carroll and Balzac. And around the film - it is, first up, itself part of a matched pair: Out One: Noli Me Tangere and Out One: Spectre. And the name itself has two parts - Out One/Spectre.

Doubles are everywhere in Rivette's films: doubles, matched pairs, halves. Though sometimes, 2's becomes 4s, become a string of supplements. A pervasive organizing principal: in Paris Belongs to Us: Juan and Gerard? And various couples arranged around them: Anne and Juan's sister; Anne and Terry. In The Nun? it's more of a series of contrasting pairs: Suzanne's mother and her mother superior; the first, good mother superior and the second, cruel one - then the second one and the indulgent one, who tries to seduce her. Other characters are arranged in pairs - the mother superior trying to seduce her/the confessor trying to seduce her; Suzanne and Therese, her "rival". L'Amour Fou? the principal is there, in the split between play and home, in the split between the play shown directly and the play shown through the odcumentary crew. Celine and Julie? Yes - the two heroines, of course; the two rivals in the melo, Sophie and Camille - and Camille and her dead sister (who are presented literally as doubles.) With repeated and doubled events and scenes - two performances on stage; two conversations with Grigoire - and all of it coming around in the end, two boats passing, and then the whole story looping around to begin again.

These structural patterns are more diffuse in the later films, but still visible: Gang of Four, like L'Amour Fou, is structured around 2 locations, the theater and the house in the suburbs; most of the theater scenes involve two actors at a time; there are, as well, two men, Antoine and Thomas, one present, one absent. La Belle Noiseuse: 2 pairs of lovers, 2 main interlopers (the art dealer and the sister), 2 paintings, and of course the bulk of the film is a two hander between Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Beart. Jeanne la Pucelle? it's split in two, with a certain parallism between the parts - it probably doesn't fit so neatly as some. Haut Bas Fragile? I'd say with these later films, the parallels and repetitions, which are still present, and powerful, have become more serial than dual - rather than a pattern of matched pairs, you have a series of pairs: A does something to B - B does something to C - C does something to D, etc. So Nathalie Richard forms a connection to Andre Marcon, who forms a connection to Marianne Denicourt, who forms an alliance with Richard and so on. Situations are repeated - couples form and evolve - all of it structured around the metaphor of dancing... Secret Defense, though, does revolve around fairly strict parallels: 2 sets of 2 siblings each, looking for vengeance, repeating situations, coming to see themselves in each other. Va Savoir? like Haut Bas Fragile, it's more serial than dual, though the main unit for the action is the couple. And The Story of Marie and Julien offers another set of examples: 2 ghosts, Marie's 2 lovers, repetition of events (notably Marie's fate, and her cumpulsion to repeat it), and so on. (And the film itself is, I think, part of a series with other Rivette films - a point worth noting, as he definitely repeats himself - returning to situations, actors, ideas, settings, and so on, over the years.)

This post has two parts: having listed off a bunch of example, I ask - what does it mean? Or (since I'm too resolute a formalist to take "what does it mean" too seriously), what does it do? Why are they there? I am tempted to invoke the spectre of structuralism, with its binaries and parameters - not without some justification, I suspect. (See this article on Cahiers de Cinema in New Left Review, or Girish's summary - Rivette brought structuralism and similar ideas to Cahiers during his turn at the helm....) But it is also connected to his interest in theater, and in collaboration. Abstractly - everything in these films is realized - known, found, understood (as much as it is understood) - through reference to other things: through performance, through connections to another person, through the search for something missing, through repetition, repeating things differently, trying to get them right this time.

But more than this: the abstraction of doubled and repeated characters and images is related to the concrete importance of collaboration in Rivette's films. Many of these pairs collaborate explicitly - Celine and Julie, Frenhofer and Marianne, Ninon and Louise (Richard and Denicourt) in Haut Bas Fragile. And collaborating pairs recur through the films, even when they are not central to the plots: consider the theater exercises in Out One; the dancers in Haut Bas Fragile. And this spirit of collaboration, of making it up together, extends beyond the doubles that appear - theater and acting are fundamental to Rivette's work, but the type of theater is important as well - it is almost always highly collaborative, improvisational (even when working with great texts) and very tentative. Consider the constant repairing of characters and actors in Gang of Four; or the way the dancers change partners in Haut Bas Fragile, or integrate others into their dancing. All of which, finally, is a reflection of the films themselves - highly collaborative, with a loose, fluid style, an improvisational feel, and their emphasis on cooperation. The way, for instance, Rivette highlights the painter - the real painter, whose hands play Frenhofer's hands - in La Belle Noiseuse. He is always interested in how art is made, showing the process, say, of the development of that painting, or of the relationship between Frenhofer and Marianne (which itself moves toward collaboration over time), or showing the details, the starts and stops, of putting on a play in all the theatrical films.

Rivette Wrapup (1)

So now that the Rivette series at the HFA is over, I want to write up some of my thoughts on it. It's not easy - as Michael Kerpan said in the comments to one of my previous notes on the series, Rivette's films are hard to write about. They resist analysis - for, I suspect, some pretty good (and analyzable) reasons. They are very fluid - the look, the story telling style, the treatment of themes and character, the themes themselves. They are about fluidity - about theater and performance, about self-invention, about living, moving through a world, consciously, actively. That's how they look - with their mobile staging, the graceful moving camera, that constantly reshapes the space, creating deeper and shallower staging in the same shot. Rivette's style is hard to describe - he doesn't seem to have a characteristic look to his films - though they are, in the end, almost instantly recognizable. That flow and pulse of people and the camera, around, through, spaces....

His style also appears in the images and events that keep reappearing in his films. I do not list such repeating images, ideas, actions, situations, places, in vain. Rivette returns constantly to these things: pairs of things, twins, ghosts, old houses, theaters, theater, lost manuscripts (or tapes or keys or art works) - conspiracies, collaborations - cats, park benches, rooftops, stairways, people slipping, tripping, stumbling. He works variations on them - and creates formal patterns out of the variations. That’s my goal, here, by the way - the next post, taking a closer look at some of these repetitions, and their possible meaning - or at least function. But now I want to point to the sense of play in his films. They are organized around those recurring elements - not so much around the meanings of those elements, as using them to generate the fiction. Take a group of actors, plus the filmmaking crew, plus his customary set of devices, plus a book of play or work of art to work from - and see what you come up with. Literally? it seems close to it in some cases - the screenwriting credits for the casts of Celine and Julie Go Boating or Haut Bas Fragile might attest to it; the long attention to the theatrical troops in Out One and L'Amour Fou seem to work on some of the same principals.

But whether they are generative or not - the films' structures have a ludic quality: think about Va Savoir - the way the story starts with Jeanne Balibar and Sergio Castellito on stage, and slowly works outward, bringing in other characters, one or two at a time, establishing primary and secondary relationsships among them, until all of them are related to all the rest. Things are set in motion - plots are enacted and schemes hatched, people assume a series of roles, different roles with different characters - and it plays out - and comes back around to where it started, ending with everyone dancing with the one that brought them. It is heartfelt - there's never any doubt that Rivette can make you feel something with his characters - but it is explicitly a game, and usually (as here) with games inside the games.

These qualities make it hard, I say, to analyze Rivette - to define his style, his interests, the meaning of his work. It is devoted to a kind of freedom and experimentation - to exploring the possibilities of the ways we invent ourselves (if you have to have a large theme) - to ways we invent worlds. It is about secrets and mysteries, but about their contingency - and the exact nature of the conspiracies that turn up in his films varies from film to film. Maybe it's real - maybe it's a game - maybe it's someone's imagination - maybe it's Balzac. It changes, and can change every time he returns to it. And the result is, his films seem inexhaustable.

Tomorrow (or whenever I get it written): a closer look at one of the recurring patterns in his films - duality, doubles and pairs, and sometimes series' - with special attention to Out One: Spectre, which pushes the principal very far. And possibly some shameless Interpretation, or at least, an attempt to draw parallels between all those doubles and the theme of collaboration that runs through his work.

Day of the Week Confusion Random 10

Music again! the usual scheme - fire up iTunes, shuffle, list the first 10, note ratings when appropriate. Away we go!

1. Arbouretum - Underneath the Arches - had to do some research on this one - from a compilation of Thrill Jockey bands playing, underneath the arches, distributed with an issue of Stop Smiling. Very nice.
2. Pavement - Summer Babe (live) [****]
3. Ministry - Thieves
4. John Cale - Hello There
5. Blind Faith - Had to Cry Today
6. Dead Boys - Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth [****] - young, loud and snotty indeed
7. Ramblin' Jack Elliot - Rake and Ramblin' Boy - from another collection, and a very nice song...
8. Butthole Surfers - Lady Sniff [***] - what more could you ask?
9. Queen - Killer Queen [***]
10. Dinosaur Jr. - Muck

And Video: it's the obvious, boring choice, but hey - Pavement works.

Housekeeping and Sport

I doubt anyone will really bother to read this post. Can't blame you. Nothing to it. I've added a couple more links: I noticed that I didn't have Andy Horbal's blog listed in the blogroll, since switching to the new blogger template. I can't really explain that. Bloody blogger! yeah - blame google! Added a couple more as well. Added a label, retroactively, to a bunch of posts. "Auteurs" - I feel I must apologize for the name. It's there to connect all the posts I do about specific filmmakers - I don't intend to limit it to directors - I use the word ("auteur") mostly because it is alphabetically distinct, unlike "filmmaker" which conflicts with "film". You gotta let those autocompletes work right!

And sport - hey! Celtics win! whoo hoo! or, Oh No! They just lost Greg Oden! or something... it's trying to lose 18 straight, but it's inevitable when you lose your best three players (and by the time he got hurt, Tony Allen was their second best player). Pierce and Wally are back - they might start winning again. Though probably not too much on their west coast and Texas journeys. I think they'll maintain a nice shot at the top spot in the draft. Another 12-13 wins leaves them with 25 or so on the year - good a shot as any.

And pitchers and catchers are getting close to the time! the happiest time of the year!

A Poliblogging Aside

I know I should leave this kind of nonsense alone, but you know how it goes.... anyone who reads political blogs probably knows about this - I think it might have turned up on TV too: a couple weeks ago John Edwards hired a couple bloggers for his campaign blog - Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, aka Shakespeare's Sister. Both are rather aggressive leftist feminist atheists, who, as bloggers do, tend to speak their minds. Well - the right wing clown show immediately sprang to action, led by the particularly ridiculous Michelle Malkin. Well, comedy ensued, but the clowns kept pouring out of the Volkswagon, and before long, out came William Donahue, professional taker-of-offense from an organization called Catholics Against God (or something like that), howling about "anti-Catholic bigotry" from Edwards' new hires. Yeah yeah, they have engaged in some intemperate rhetoric against the Catholic church - they are, after all, 21st century adult women, a group which has a pretty good reason to despise the Catholic church and its policies - if you can't hate the pope, who can you hate? Anyway - John Edwards did not have the option of greeting this clamor with the hearty fuck you it deserves, so he issued a non-apology non-apology, as did the women, and there you go. But you know how those things go - it's been another week and they have both resigned, apparently after Marcotte wrote a review of Children of Men that included the shocking revelation that Christianity is patriarchal, sending the clowns for their noses again....

Anyway. It must mean something, though it's hard to figure out what. It being another year before the primaries actually start, and another 8-9 months before the election. Perfectly sensible people are railing against Edwards for letting Marcotte and McEwan go - but really: they were a pretty small part of the campaign - I suspect this "controversy" is a pretty small issue as well. Who actually cares what a couple bloggers think? Other than bloggers and blog readers? Professional thugs like Donohue will find someone to attack no matter what - if there's nothing there, they'll make it up. Still - there are other dimensions to this. From a blogging perspective - I'm with Yglesias here: I don't quite understand why they were hired in the first place, or why they took jobs with the Edwards campaign. I'm sure both women have skills and talents that would make them valuable to the campaign - but they weren't hired for their skills and talents, they were hired for their online personae. And both of them have rather aggressive, at least "outspoken" personae - especially Marcotte. How does that fit with a political campaign? Edwards isn't trying to raise hell here - maybe if he were - okay. But it still strikes me as odd.

Political bloggers, especially, seem to me to fall into three styles, that I might as well call evangelists, edifiers, and exhorters. Evangelists go out and try to convert people to their positions - they preach to the unconverted. Exhorters preach to the choir - they rally the troops, they build resolve and inspire action. Edifiers argue, explain, analyze - they are the wonks, the pundits - they may address the unconvinced or the convinced - but that's secondary to layign out the positions.... Marcotte, especially, is a classic exhorter type: she preaches to the converted - she stirs them up - she puts them in a fighting mood. She galls the other side - and she may very well turn off the undecided. Which is the problem - political campaigns need evangelists, not exhorters. (Though to be fair: the problem with calling them "evangelists" is that you don't have to be spreading good news: you can preach doom and destruction; you can condemn - it's a similar role, though - you are taking a message to people outside your group, to make them change. Jeremiah and Jonah were evangelists, basically; William Donahue, for all intents and purposes, is an "evangelist" - trying to get people to turn on Edwards. Political campaigns can do that too - the right wing does plenty of it, though not so much through blogs.) But politics needs exhorters - people like her serve their purpose, defining the issues, staking out the limits, and inspiring the "base". It seems to me that hiring her took her away from the role she is most suited for. So, in the end - this might actually be for the best.

It definitely is for the best re Shakespeare's Sister - that is a damned good blog. I'm certainly not going to be reading any politicians' blogs, even when the election campaigns get going for real - so it's just as well that the good bloggers don't disappear down that rabbit hole....

No Expectations

I'm still putting off writing some more about Jacques Rivette. It's a poser - whether to knock out quick impressions of the films, or try to work up an essay, or - I don't know - make a list of things: doubles, shadows and ghosts, artists and actors, old houses, the way women walk, conspiracies, cats, park benches, the rooftops of Paris, women who don't need men and men who are willing to live with that, bad fathers, desks and desk drawers, overnight bags - some of the things you will find in his films. We shall see.

In the meanwhile: a film: this, February, is, in film terms, the cruelest month - what you have in the theaters this time of year - man. Once you see the oscar bait, there ain't much left: that is my explanation for seeing Factory Girl. What else is there? Alas... Factory Girl is a sort of biopic about Edie Segdwick, starring Sienna Miller, directed by George Hickenlooper. Hayden Christenson turns up attempting to impersonate (Not) Bob Dylan - Guy Pearce appears in the less thankless role of Andy Warhol. The film as such isn't worth much, though it's harmless enough - a kind of haphazard style, lots of cheesy montage sequences, little tricks with the film stock, some gestures towards fake versions of Warhol's films... The story is ridiculous, with Warhol and crowd as dope fiend vampires, frittering their talents on soup cans and sucking poor Edie dry, while not-Dylan represents all that is pure and good and real, offering Edie a Way Out, but she doesn't take it, alas.... Miller does her best with this nonsense, but there's not much to do, and her best isn't anything special. Christenson is dreadful beyond compare, though whether that should be blamed on him or the script is an open question. (In either case, Dylan did well to stop them using his name - beyond being portrayed wretchedly, not-Dylan comes off not only as an insufferable prick [which Dylan proper might well have been - he certainly liked to take the piss, from what I've heard], but as a self-righteous, self-important tiresome prick. That seems less likely.) This leaves the film ripe pickings for Pearce to steal, and steal it he does.

He has an advantage: Warhol did a fine job of turning himself into one of his art works. He emptied himself of all the usual signs of emotion and personality, made himself blank and bland as his images. Because of this, when actors play him, they have to stick to his presentation of himself - the look, the mannerisms, the voice - the intentional blandness. Dylan, being gnomic and strange, mysterious and secretive, dropping hints and making references to be decoded and all, invites actors and writers to interpret him, to try to parse him out - at least that happens here: not-Dylan has all the signifiers of Dylan, but with all the hints and poses filled in with cliches. Godawful dreck results. But Warhol - and Pearce as Warhol - gets away from that. Even trying to slip the odd humanizing quality to the poor man has to pass through his persona, through his version of himself: whatever you do, you have to do in Warhol's terms, because he took away any other terms to do it with. And because of this - Pearce gives something completely different than the rest of the cast - he gives a kind of collaboration. (Hey! another item for my Rivette list!) With Warhol - his performance feels like a collaboration with Warhol, not with the script or the director of this film.

That's a bit of a lost opportunity: there's a chance, making a film about an artist (or group artists) to make the film collaborative, even if the artist isn't actually around for it. To work off the art, to incorporate it into the film. Hickenlooper tries to show us some of Warhol's art - a few iconic images, and a few recreated clips from the films. This could have been interesting - it isn't. Partly because he screws up the clips - mostly by abandoning their style - that impassive camera, the awkward zooms and focus shifts, and most of all, their duration. Some of it he screws up by shooting the act of shooting - thus freeing the camera to be pointless, and reducing the films to their silly behavior... Some of it he screws up by shooting the film being screened - and moving the camera around, zooming in to create closeups and such that Warhol (and Morrissey later on) stayed away from. It's anti-collaborative: it's trying to assert control over the image, over Warhol's art. (I'd say over not-Dylan's as well, except there isn't any actual Dylan (or not-Dylan) music in the film. There is some not-Velvet Underground music played over a portrayal of VU&N - complete with cymbals! in 1966!! - I mean - he has to know better than that!) The only element of the time that escapes this inanity is Pearce as Warhol.

Now - again I say - it's a missed opportunity. There are some odd moments where things creep in that might have been more interesting. Bits of dialogue - Warhol's remarks about just watching people, letting them be what they were... or the bits referring to his background as a coal miner's son, or his oft-remarked work ethic. That sort of direct, unpretentious work ethic is central to Warhol's value - his art gains power through repetition, through time, through the iteration of it. That, and again - the sense that art was collaborative: a gathering of people, working off one another - which runs through this period of Warhol's work. You get those hints - from scraps of dialogue, and from Pearce, I'd say - of the class dynamics under things: Warhol is strongly associated with work here (a notion common to accounts of the factory), and comes off as tougher, more subversive than the story wants to make him. There are hints - but the film doesn't really develop them. Instead, the words (sometimes), and Pearce, and Warhol himself - haunt it. The ghost of a better film...

Friday Random Ten on Saturday

My Friday ritual is increasingly turning into a Saturday post. Though most of the responsibility for that lies with Jacques Rivette. (Four more films to go, for those of you in the Boston area.) Not that anyone is holding their breath waiting to see what iTunes coughs up this week...

1. Benny Goodman - Gone with "What" Wind - from the Charlie Christian record
2. High Rise - Pop Sicle (live) - **** - 11 minutes of shameless sludgy guitar wankery - just my kind of thing, as the rating attests
3. Outkast (Big Boi) - In Your Dreams - Idlewild - reminds me I have to get the movie...
4. Charlie Parker - Stupendous - nice day for the jazz. My jazz CDs are woefully under-represented on the iPod: I've gone years listening to almost nothing but jazz, buying almost nothing but jazz - but haven't loaded much of it in the computer. It never really works on the iPod, too much of the subtlety of acoustic instruments gets washed out, I don't know if it's the compression of the music, the quality of the player or headphones, or just the fact that I listen to the iPod in public, noisy places, like the train. Whatever it is - it's never satisfying. So - other than Parker and some Coltrane, and a good deal of fusion (which, being electric, works better - so I have Miles and Mahavishnu Orchestra and the like, and they sound fine...), most of my jazz is still offline.
5. Robert Wyatt - Insensatez
6. Diane CLuck - All I Bring you is Love - from one of those Mojo collections, this one devoted to English folk... nice enough, I guess.
7. Gogol Bordello - Start Wearing Purple - **** - all your sanity and wits they will all vanish, I promise, it's just a matter of time. Indeed.
8. Fleetwood Mac - Coming Your Way (live from the Boston Tea Party) - I'm sure anyone who has actually read these posts over the years, or knows me from elsewhere, has gathered that I like my guitar solos.... I've dropped hints through the years, I think, of my favorites in the art, though not very systematically (though there was that list I posted after Johnny Ramone died). Though linking to that is a kind of mea culpa - what the hell possessed me? My 10 favorite guitar players - with no Peter Green? The plain truth is, other than Richard Thompson, he is probably my favorite: others (Hendrix at least) might be better - but Hendrix is so good he intimidates me - it's hard to connect with his music personally sometimes.... But Peter Green: shoot.... Anyway - this is just another jam, but features some nice work by the band. They were the real deal, when Green was on board....
9. Mockers - God Only Knows - more Mojo, this one from the recent Brian Wilson tribute set.
10. John Lennon - Isolation - nice track from what I think is the third best ex-Beatles record. (What are 1 and 2?) Well - All Things Must Pass really is the best, I think.... #2 is from that other somewhat overlooked Beatle collaborator, backed by John and Ringo at their rockingest - Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band record. Why not?

Video? Well - look what I found when I started looking for High Rise video - Jean-Claude Van Damme! that was easy!

2 War Films

I am way behind in my movie writing - way behind. I've been seeing films - just not writing about them. Unfortunately, they are films I want to write about: the Rivette series; the films I mentioned in my last contemplative cinema post (Honor de Cavelleria, Lights in the Dusk, etc.); the new Korean series I saw last week - more... They deserve attention - they aren't films I can list off with one-liners and stars. ("Time, **1/2 - Kim Ki-duk does Teshigahara." - no, not good enough.) And on top of that - I should try to work something up for the Talkingmoviezzz site - I made indications I would. Fortunately, most of the films I've been seeing aren't going to be making any appearances in the states any time soon. (The odd festival, maybe - not much more.) The Host is supposed to be released - maybe by the time it does, I'll write a review. In fact, I suppose that's the redemption of all of this - none of these films are in release: writing about them in a month is just as good as writing about them today - so better to do em up right.

Now - the exception to all that is the one new, broad release film I have seen recently: Letters From Iwo Jima. Another Oscar nominated film - like the others I have seen (Departed, Babel, Little Miss Sunshine), it seems to me a perfectly acceptable choice - competent, interesting enough, not an embarrassment, but nothing special. Like too many of Eastwood's films, this one has very little going for it beyond Clint - there is nothing in this film, not one second, not one line of dialogue, not one shot, that is not a cliche. Eastwood brings his usual economy and precision, but there's not much more to say for it. Perfectly generic war movie, built to spec, more or less flawlessly, but still, to spec.

Meanwhile: that was Saturday afternoon. Saturday night, I went by the HFA, thinking I was in for a 4 hour Rivette film: no! it was the 6 hour version of Jeanne La Pucelle! in two parts, starting at 7 pm.... Now: I have noticed a strange phenomenon, watching all these Rivette films. After a while - their length seems completely natural. I find myself wondering, how do other people make films that only last 2 hours? and why? This reflection takes another form - one I was particularly aware of after seeing th Eastwood earlier: how is it, I thought, that 6 hours of Rivette flows by without ever seeming padded or tiring, yet Letters, at a bit over 2 hours, dragged? And Eastwood keeps things moving - imagine some hack making that film!

Anyway - Rivette's take on Joan of Arc may be long, but it feels right. He lets scenes build - he lets things happen on screen. He gives you time to get to know his characters. He also keeps you thinking - about the story, about film, about storytelling. He tells the story by alternating between dramatization of the story, and having characters sit and address the camera directly, telling the story. This gives it a rhythm, breaking the story into pieces (which he also does by using long blackouts for transitions), breaking the illusion of the story - the anachronism of the characters telling the story to the camera, as if they were being interviewed - the strangeness of cutting away from moments in the story to someone narrating. It keeps pulling you in - and tells the story in a pretty complete and comprehensible way.

And the film itself - is quite a departure from his more characteristic modern films, but still remarkable. Its unromantic treatment of old spaces - old castles and churches, that look old - and were old, even in 1429. Its unromantic treatment of people - their shabby clothes, their unremarkable hair and faces, their unromantic behavior (people tripping, falling down, dropping things, breaking things; uncooperative horses, the unglamorous operation of machines), the matter of fact rendering of war. I was thinking, watching Letters From Iwo Jima, that I had seen it all before - when the shooting starts, the cameras turn hand held, the cutting gets disjunctive, the sound gets sharper, etc. That's how war movies all look these days. Then seeing Jeanne La Pucelle - you see war rendered in a completely different way. The first "action" sequence - starts with guns being fired - their smoke quickly fills the whole screen, the camera sort of meanders along, waiting for the smoke to clear. The fighting, when it appears, is not spectacular - sure sure, it's a budget constraint - but it still looks right: a lot of aimless dashing around, men (and one woman) laying about them with swords, shooting arrows off screen without aiming much, people ducking and dodging and sometimes falling... All of it, still, organized, as much as war can be, and shown so you can see what they are trying to do and whether they are succeeding. It was most certainly not what you see in every other war movie.

There's little doubt left: Jacques Rivette is one of the great filmmakers of the last 40 years - this series has been a magnificent experience. These films need to be on DVD - people need to see them. There are 4 more to come (and plenty of time tonight to get to part 2 of Jeanne La Pucelle, if you live within 2 hours of Boston and don't mind getting out of the film at 1 AM - they didn't schedule it planning on the 6 hour version), most of which I have seen, though only on DVD, so I am looking forward to it. I hope I can work up a few more notes on the series: there is plenty to say - he is extremely inspirational...

Music Post

Since it's Saturday already - I guess I'll cut to the chase: quick and dirty! iPod, random 10! (Rated where rated.)

1. Blue Cheer - Feathers from your Tree
2. James White and the Blacks - White Devil [a very cool record, that...]
3. James Brown - I Got You (I feel Good) ***** [of course]
4. Gogol Bordello - Avenue B
5. Marvin Gaye - God is Love
6. Yoshimi and Yuka - Elegant Bird
7. Ghost - Live With Me **** [cover of the stones song by Japanese psychedelic folk rockers - very nice]
8. Wire - Qestion of Degree
9. The Kinks - Come Dancing [nice little song, though a ways down through the Kinks' catalogue.]
10. Half Japanese - Fire to Burn *** [throw your evil records on the fire, on the fire to burn - records and sin!]

YouTube? I suppose there are some obvious choices, but I think I'll go a bit out of the way. First - not the same song, but you have to take what YouTube offers, and a little Blue Cheer would go down well. It would be nice to have the summertime blues right about now, instead of freezing my ass off...



And for a bonus, since they have a new record out: a nice bit of noise from Masaki Batoh and company - not the stones, but again - you take what you can get.

Hippies 1, Paranoid Idiots 0

You know - for a while, watching Mumbles Menino and cronies turn this hair scare, um, this "bomb" scare in Boston into a national punchline, I was feeling really down, ashamed of my city. But now - the suspects, shown here on Fox news, have restored my faith: Boston, Mumbles and company notwithstanding, is a pretty cool place: this press conference is beautiful. Listening to the blowhard reporters trying to badger the 2 guys into taking the press conference "seriously" probably goes far in explaining how this whole thing happened. Watching the 2 guys give it back is absolutely priceless. Thank god, thank god someone being railroaded on some childish absurdity stood up and gave the raspberry to the weasels. (Link from Xoverboard.)